well, as asimov has worked it's way into classics departments, a predictable false reading of him has become prominent amongst english majors, most of whom might be good at spelling bees but don't have the education required to understand much of what he's talking about, much of the time. and, it seems a lot of them have decided that asimov was secretly a deist, writing a pro-religious mythology, like l. ron hubbard. who knew?
i'm going to be taking a giant leap backwards from that and analyzing asimov from a marxist perspective, instead - which means hauling out the hegel. and, i'm not doing this out of ideological persuasion, or at least not strictly; i honestly think my reading is going to be a more accurate perspective of what was actually going through his head.
so, am i arguing that asimov was a marxist? no - i don't think that's quite right. he was a liberal, which meant he would have had some sympathy for marxism, while presenting a lot of critiques of it. but, that doesn't make him different than the smarter socialists at the time, does it? but, no - i'm not going to advance the theory that asimov was a closet stalinist, so much as i'm going to recognize that he was a liberal intellectual of russo-judaic background operating in the period from 1940-1970 and he consequently would have existed in a liberal-marxist framework, whether he accepted the ideas or not.
so, the classicists want to interpret him in their worldview, and whatever - that's fine. but, it's exceedingly unlikely that it's what asimov himself was thinking. my hegelian analysis, which is coming, is probably the more correct deconstruction of asimov's actual thinking.
